


glass house

by connabeth



Series: 12 Days of Percabeth [7]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Married Couple, maybe an ounce of fluff?, they have a son
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28207080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/connabeth/pseuds/connabeth
Summary: she doesn’t know how to live anymore, and after the fact, neither does heorthe one where he’s losing her and he doesn’t know how to get her back
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Series: 12 Days of Percabeth [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2055423
Comments: 20
Kudos: 78





	glass house

**Author's Note:**

> this isn’t like the stuff i usually post, so lmk if you liked it or not. i wasn’t feeling it today so i couldn’t bring myself to write fluff but i actually like something i’ve written for once so hey🤷🏾♀️
> 
> also a reminder that no one is exempt from suffering at the hand of mental illness, no matter how well their life could seem to be going.

He wonders where she is now. A lost soul in the fields of Elysium? A new life doomed to repeat the same mistakes? He doesn’t know, and perhaps that’s what hurts the most. He chooses to believe she waits for him, if only to keep himself alive. He closes his eyes and sets his coffee onto the side table, hands immediately mourning the loss of its warmth. The image of her dances beneath his eyelids, taunting, deliberate. Is she happy now?

Her memory haunts his being—everywhere he goes, she follows—and it used to be the other way around, didn’t it?

Everything is gray.

It’s not the kind he loves.

—

She sits beside him, blonde hair glinting like threads of gold under the gentle hand of Helios. A notebook rests in her lap, the page an untouched blank canvas, a place to pour all her dreams, ambitions, and fantasies into the ink that lines it. The creativity doesn’t come. Her mind is the blank canvas, devoid of imagination, of ideas, an inescapable hurricane of emotion, none conducive to life. The pen is tightly gripped between tense fingers, the unnoticeable tremble of her hand making it quiver. She relaxes her grip, suddenly and drives the pen into the ground before he can blink an eye.

“Annabeth?” he asks, leaning closer to rest a hand on the bare skin of her thigh. “Are you okay?”

She feels a laugh bubble up in her throat but it catches on the way out, and all she can do is smile weakly. “I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything anymore.”

His brow furrows, concern surging up within his chest. He’s noticed she’s been acting different, lately. More reserved. She never fails to shower him and their son with affection—she never fails to smile at them when she comes home after a long and taxing day at work, never fails to kiss them both goodnight, never fails to thread her fingers through their hair and ruffle it just to mess with them, never fails to tell them _“I love you”_ when they need to hear it and when they don’t.

But there’s been a lingering sadness that’s been following her around, like a stain she couldn’t quite wash out. He catches a hollow, distant look in those beautiful gray eyes more often than he’d like. She moves with caution, now, posture rigid and shoulders tense. Never quite satisfied. He rarely sees that adorable dimple press into her cheek, that stunning sparkle in her eye, that confidence once wired into her body like a second skin. Energy slowly drains from her frame, the vibrance he’d grown used to and loved dearly slipping away, inch by inch, with every tick of the clock, a deafening countdown. _How long before it detonated?_

He stretches an arm out and takes her hand in his, trying to give her all the warmth he has in him. “Talk to me, Beth. What’s going on, baby?”

She pulls her hands out of his and wringes them together, uncertainty and anxiety plaguing her figure, and he is immediately struck by the sudden coldness. “I don’t know,” she repeats. “Everything is just so...bleak. Pointless. I mean, what am I even trying to do here?”

“What do you mean, sweetheart? We’re building a life together, just like we always wanted. Just like we always said we would, all those years ago when we were kids. You’re doing amazing at your job and we moved into a beautiful new house _you_ designed, not a year ago. That’s what you’ve _done_. What we’ve done.” He takes her hand in his again, this time encasing it with both of his, making she can’t pull away. “And we’re gonna keep doing the same thing, together.” She was silent, not bothering to glance in his direction, unable to meet his gaze. “Annabeth,” he calls again, “talk to me, please.”

“There’s nothing to say, Percy,” she shrugs helplessly, finally gathering her nerves and looking back up at him. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

He tries many more times that day, the next day, and the day after that. He never stops asking. But he still doesn’t know what’s wrong and, maybe, she doesn’t either. This kind of sadness is the worst kind, he knows. An unfixable problem—there isn’t a single, identifiable root, making it all the more impossible to resolve. All he can do is watch as it chips away at her core, piece by piece—rotting flesh, rotting memories, rotting existence. She’s withering away, and parts of him die with her. The ticking in his head grows louder.

—

She was a sinking ship, he realizes. And she tried to push him away on a feebly strung-together liferaft so he wouldn’t drown with her. She had saved him from drowning, once. He remembers the acid burning in his throat, the black currents churning around them, hot air expanding his lungs, the angry red of the atmosphere casting a sinister shadow on their faces. He remembers a cry of desperation, of indignance, of determination. He remembers an extraordinary hope for the future, a promise they made to themselves on their march to death, a mantra to repeat, fuel for survival. _What were your plans for us?_

He couldn’t do the same for her. He let her slip away from his embrace into the briny waters, seafoamed peaks, tumultuous waves, unforgiving vast navy of the ocean. The guilt eats away at him, in his waking hours—when he forces himself to get out of bed, shower, brush his teeth, feed his son and take him to school, survive work to get back home to his son and his cold bed—and in the suffocating silence of the night, creeping into his dreams, an endless cycle of torment. _I deserve it_ , he thinks everyday the moment he awakens. _I deserve it_.

College, marriage, children. They had done it all. So where had it all gone wrong?

She was a prisoner. She never wanted to escape the life she’s worked so hard to build with the family she’d worked so hard to find—she wanted to escape the ceaseless torture of her own mind. She was chained to rhythm of her self-destructive thoughts until her dying breath.

 _Son of the sea_ , he thinks sardonically. His dad’s prized son—hero, husband, father. What kind of son really was he?

Drowning. Isn’t that what he was doing now? The son of the sea—one who couldn’t save the woman he loves, _or_ himself.

The coffee sits on the couch-side table, long-forgotten, now bleak to the taste, it’s warmth having leached into the dead air.

Everything is gray.

It’s not the kind he loves.

—

He watches as their son grows up, graduates high school, then college, works tirelessly in his career, finds somebody to love, becomes a father to a heart-wrenchingly adorable set of twins. He lives for his son, the only remnant of her in this life. He sees her in his boy, everyday. And it aches. It aches like no wound he’s had to suffer up until this point, but he tries his best to hide it. Theo doesn’t need the burden of his father’s guilt, doesn’t need to recognize the pain bubbling underneath the surface of his father’s eyes, doesn’t need to know that he is a walking reminder of what his father lost. But he does, anyway.

His son—and his grandkids—are his only sources of comfort in his growing age. They each carry a little piece of her in their souls, and he smiles, knowing she lives through them. The pain of loss doesn’t ebb away with time—it stays as fresh as the dreadful day he lost her, a searing stab in the small of his back. _I just had this feeling you were in danger_ , her voice rings in his head. He just learns to get better at coping. His son helps him with it, more than he should, and Percy feels guilty all over again. This was a boy who lost his mother, a mother who’s never stopped doting on him since the day he was brought into the world—and here he was, comforting his father.

Their bed continues to feel vacant in the wake of a missing warm body, his side continues to feel empty. His hands are cold with no one to hold, his lips are pressed thin with no one to kiss, and his mouth is dry with no one to ramble to, inhibitions cast into the wind. The solitude he feels is the kind he knows he would’ve had to deal with for eternity if he had accepted the gods’ “gift” on his sixteenth birthday. Somehow, this is better. He still has his family, and he still has her, in a way. They’re not completely out of reach. He hopes it’s only a matter of time.

He closes his eyes and dreams of her, the visions of her that live in the forefront of his mind—and the recesses too. He doesn’t let it haunt him. He smiles when he feels the ghost of her touch in his sleep—she is a dream, but she is real. Her hand feels warm and solid in his, the beautiful ring of laugh loud in his ear, the smell of her familiar lemon shampoo drifting into his nose. She leans back into his chest, sitting between his legs, toes digging into the grains of sand beneath them. The salty breeze caresses his face, the touch of a lover. Eternal and understanding.

He sobs into his hands when he wakes up.

—

His son clutches his hand, holding onto the last pieces of him. Percy lets out a tired sigh, his breath heavy with decades of bitterness, hope, grief, love, anger. Exhaustion. He brings his son’s hand up to his lips and presses a soft kiss to the warm skin, a parting gift, a token of a life long-lived. Theo chokes out a sob, smoothing his father’s hair back, tears blurring his vision. Percy holds his son’s trembling hand to his chest, letting him feel his weakening heartbeat, a heart that beat for so many things that were taken from him, one by one. He closes his eyes once more, unveiling the path into a new life.

Everything is gray. Familiar, reassuring.

It’s the kind he loves.

**Author's Note:**

> yay they meet again🥳...don’t kill me  
> come yell at me on tumblr @silenabeth


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